What happened to William the Conqueror in the end? Same as James Bond – he exploded.
It’s a strange expression, “What happened in the end?” Looked at from a historical point of view, it implies that the final thing to happen is what happened overall – it was the most important, the defining thing. But life doesn’t have a tournament structure. For a mortal species, to focus on what happened last is a pretty downbeat way of looking at things. In the end, we die. But that’s not necessarily the main thing about us.
Still, our ends often overshadow us. History bristles with examples of people who died in poverty despite being great artists or musicians or having invented vulcanised rubber. The penurious demise casts a pall over their achievements. It can make their efforts seem futile – those people get defined by the injustice of fate. Similarly when the people meeting grisly ends are nasty, we can feel that justice has been done – but that doesn’t make sense either. What happened to Adolf Hitler in the end was no less than he deserved, but it didn’t restore justice. It didn’t make everything OK.
I wasn’t expecting to find out what happened to James Bond in the end. He’s not real. He doesn’t have to end. Or begin. There’s no need to make those things part of the story. So imagine my surprise, when tentatively venturing out to the cinema in post-lockdown London for the relaxing escapism of a Bond movie, at finding myself (spoiler alert) watching that character die.
I was fucking furious. I’d looked forward to that night out. We’d been to Pizza Express first. We’d had popcorn and chocolate buttons brought to our seats at a swanky cinema. And then, at the very end of No Time to Die, James Bond is killed in an explosion. Yes, he actually dies. In the middle of a pandemic when death was feeling really unoriginal. I’m sorry if this is where you’re finding that out but it’s one of the most extraordinary creative missteps that Hollywood money has ever been lavished on. Honestly, the whole team right up to Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig need to be lined up against a wall and criticised.
James Bond not dying is the premise of a Bond film. It’s the premise of the whole franchise. What you are supposed to watch and enjoy is the exciting manner in which he does not die. The fact that a movie that departs from this sound convention was deemed by many reviewers to be clever or interesting or dark or real – to be, in summary, good and indeed better than the ones where he doesn’t die – is an index of how mediocre, joyless and self-importantly worthy our commentariat has become.
You may be thinking that there’s more about James Bond in this extract than you expected. Sorry. But my point is that giving Bond a sad and lonely end casts a shadow over every other moment in his life that we’ve seen portrayed. Everything Bond undergoes in every other film – every moment of suavity, action, humour or seduction – is happening to a man destined to die young, heartbroken and alone.
It’s the same with William the Conqueror. At least that was fate, not a creative choice. His bowels exploded while some monks in Caen were trying to cram his bloated corpse into a sarcophagus that was far too snug for him. The consequent stench rather ruined the solemnity of the remaining funeral rites.
So that was the very last anyone saw of him. The bit before that wasn’t much more dignified. The bloating which necessitated the sarcophagus-cramming had partly happened pre- and partly postmortem. William had put on a bit of weight in his declining years, which is not how one imagines the victor of the Battle of Hastings. There’s a glum poignancy to it, a sign of mundane human frailty, which undermines the snapshot image of the victorious warrior. Suddenly you imagine a cross and red-faced old fat guy. From divinely inspired warrior to compulsively snacking gammon.
Such bodily frailty reminds me of Napoleon’s piles. They stopped him being able to ride a horse at Waterloo. He was a brilliant general, an administrator of unparalleled energy, a ruthless tyrant and a politician of dazzling opportunism. But he was also a portly chap who, on the day his fate was decided, was mainly thinking about his sore arse. If he’s in the same afterlife as Kenneth Williams, maybe he can lend the emperor a tube of Anusol.
In 1087 William, by then nearly 60, set off on a military expedition against King Philip I of the Franks (basically France, but it isn’t called that yet). William, in defiance of his age and obesity, was attacking the town of Mantes and really got stuck in. And then, in turn, the pommel of his horse’s saddle got stuck in him, right in his new enormous stomach. It caused a horrific injury and the best medical advice at the time was just to settle in for a long agonising death. William had himself taken to a priory outside Rouen and proceeded to do so.
When he finally expired and all the important people had legged it to try and secure their futures under whatever the new regime turned out to be, his attendants stripped the room, and corpse, of anything of value, and then fled. There lay the Conqueror, naked and alone and beginning to decompose. Bleak.
A fairly lowly knight had to arrange for the body to be transported the 80 miles from Rouen to Caen, where William had said he wanted to be buried in one of the monasteries he founded. This was the only element of the funeral that went as he would have wanted. It was marred first by fire in the town, then by a weird heckling incident when a member of the congregation claimed the church had been illegally built on his family’s land, and then finally by the aforementioned royal bowel-bursting. That’s what happened to him in the end.
This is an edited extract from Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens by David Mitchell, published by Michael Joseph (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
